Nightmare on MCNLive Street! November 20, 2006

I was so excited to try this new (small) live CD that featured all the bells&whitles that I may have wanted. I was secretly hoping that it would allow me to load onto the Hard Disk as well.

Anyway, I loaded MCNLive and was impressed by its speed (even though I didn’t use the copy2ram option). It was also quite attractive, and provided easy help.

Living with Linux sometimes means living dangerously

I quickly enabled the 3D interface and had a Mandrivaesque computer. I wanted to do more tests, so I tried experimenting with some of the graphics features.

…And then suddenly it happened. A crash. But what was worse, there was nothing I could do to get out of it. Since I was on my Lenovo (which doesn’t have a force shut)… I pressed the off button for a long time, I tried the useless-in-Linux ctrl-alt-del… and when I got desperate, I tried every possible combination I could humanly try.

The system crashed when I was trying to do a simple “resize” window. I could see the window, the mouse was moving, but nothing else was responding.

Anyway… I kept pressing buttons, hoping that I would be able to get out. I even considered draining my batteries… then suddenly one combination worked…. and I was in the text menu of linux. I immediately typed reboot… and then it ask me to remove CD and press enter. I removed the CD, pressed enter… and guess what? System stalled again!!!

Again it was time for combinations and permuations… but nothing seemed to work. Actually I was able to type… but not able to get the computer to respond. I tried putting the CD back in, back out… whatever.

Finally, I pressed some comination… BLACK screen… I left the computer on for half-an-hour… and then I tried the system off feature. Success! I could restart the machine. Phew!

Well… after that nightmare… I didn’t dare want to put my CD back onto my Lenovo. But I did like what I saw, when it was working, so I will be trying the Live CD on my harddisk. At least to see how it’s hardware recognition fares on my Desktop.

Also… because it’s easier to shut down a Desktop… and living with Linux sometimes means living dangerously.

For those of you who want screenshots… I didn’t even have time to see the full strength on my Laptop. Hopefully my desktop will wield some healthier results.

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[…] days ago, even MCNLive is an excellent Live CD to show cool linux capabilities… but I think I freaked out when something went wrong. Usually LiveCDs should not harm any system, however it’s just […]